Volume 6 Issue 4, April 2003

Giving birth improves spatial memory in rodents. A new study shows that oxytocin, which triggers birth and milk release, activates a signaling cascade involved in learning, and that this hormone is necessary and sufficient for memory improvement in mice that have had litters.

Transplantation studies using mouse models for Alzheimer's disease reveal that diffusible Aβ peptide is sufficient for amyloid plaque formation but is influenced by the local environment.

Primary auditory cortex neurons are now shown to respond to the probability of a sound's occurrence--perhaps a correlate of the mismatch negativity implicated in novelty detection.

A new study shows that activity in the superior colliculus encodes the distance to the goal of the orienting movement, not the particular saccade or saccades used to get there.